By Nasreen Seria and Mike Cohen Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- South Africa's rand, which plunged to a six-year low against the dollar last week, is under pressure from the global credit crisis and not from a ``speculative attack,'' the National Treasury said. The current-account deficit, which is expected to reach 7.6 percent of gross domestic product, makes the country more ``vulnerable,'' Lesetja Kganyago, the Treasury's director general, said in an interview in Cape Town today. The rand dropped to 10.8751 to the dollar, the lowest level in more than six years, on Oct. 16 as concern about a global recession led investors to sell riskier, emerging-market assets. The South African currency has slumped 33 percent against the dollar this year, the worst performer of 16 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg. ``The global factors have generated risk aversion,'' Kganyago said. ``The rand is not under speculative attack.'' The government won't use its foreign-currency reserves to help support the currency, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told reporters today. Gross gold and foreign-currency reserves have surged 39 percent to $34.4 billion in the past two years. ``What we've seen in the past fortnight are certainly huge gyrations on exchange rates around the world,'' Manuel said. ``Using reserves to try and peg some artificial exchange rate is certainly something that would be out of keeping with the way the Reserve Bank runs monetary policy.'' To contact the reporters on this story: Nasreen Seria in Johannesburg nseria@bloomberg.netMike Cohen in Cape Town at mcohen21@bloomberg.net.

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